Conventions Used in This Book

The following is a list of the typographical conventions used in this book:

Italic

Used to indicate new terms, URLs, filenames, file extensions, and directories and to highlight comments in examples. For example, a path in the filesystem will appear as /Developer/Applications.

Constant width

Used to show code examples, the contents of files, commands, or the output from commands.

Constant width bold

Used in examples and tables to show commands or other text that should be typed literally.

Constant width italic

Used in examples and tables to show text that should be replaced with user-supplied values.

Color

The second color is used to indicate a cross-reference within the text.

RETURN

A carriage return (RETURN) at the end of a line of code is used to denote an unnatural line break; that is, you should not enter these as two lines of code, but as one continuous line. Multiple lines are used in these cases due to page width constraints.

Menu symbols

When looking at the menus for any application, you will see some symbols associated with keyboard shortcuts for a particular command. For example, to open an old chat in iChat, you would go to the File menu and select Open . . . (File Open . . . ), or you could issue the keyboard shortcut, -O. The symbol corresponds to the key (also known as the "Command" key), located to the left and right of the spacebar on any Macintosh keyboard.

You should pay special attention to notes set apart from the text with the following icons:

This is a tip, suggestion, or general note. It contains useful supplementary information about the topic at hand.

This is a warning or note of caution.

The thermometer icons, found next to each hack, indicate the relative complexity of the hack: